Although the Communists were opposed to torture in theory and on principle, officials were told that they should not intervene if the peasants wished to vent their anger in passionate acts of revenge.

People such as Jin were not just wealthy owners of land, but had wielded absolute and arbitrary power, which they indulged willfully, over the lives of the local population.

They were called e-ba ('ferocious despots').

In some areas the killing extended to ordinary landlords, who were called 'stones' obstacles to the revolution.

Policy toward the 'stones' was: "When in doubt, kill." My father thought this was wrong and told his subordinates, and the people at public meetings, that only those who unquestionably had blood on their hands should be sentenced to death. In his reports to his superiors he repeatedly said that the Party should be careful with human lives, and that excessive executions would only harm the revolution. It was partly because many people like my father spoke up that in February 1948 the Communist leadership issued urgent instructions to stop violent excesses.

All the time, the main forces of the Communist army were coming nearer. In early 1948 my father's guerrillas joined up with the regular army. He was put in charge of an intelligence-gathering system covering the Jinzhou Huludao area; his job was to track the deployment of Kuomintang forces and monitor their food situation. Much of his information came from agents inside the Kuomintang, including Yu-wu. From these reports he heard of my mother for the first time.

The thin, dreamy-looking man my mother saw brushing his teeth in the courtyard that October morning was known among his fellow guerrillas for his fastidiousness. He brushed his teeth every day, which was a novelty to the other guerrillas and to the peasants in the villages he had fought through. Unlike everyone else, who simply blew their noses onto the ground, he used a handkerchief, which he washed whenever he could. He never dipped his face towel in the public washbasin like the other soldiers, as eye diseases were widespread. He was also known as scholarly and bookish and always carried some volumes of classical poetry with him, even in battle.

When she had first seen the "Wanted' posters and heard about this dangerous 'bandit' from her relatives, my mother could tell that they admired as well as feared him. Now she was not a bit disappointed that the legendary guerrilla did not look at all warrior like my father also knew of my mother's courage and, most unusual of all, the fact that she, a seventeen-year-old girl, was giving orders to men. An admirable and emancipated woman, he had thought, although he had also imagined her as a fierce dragon. To his delight he found her pretty and feminine, even rather coquettish. She was both soft spoken and persuasive and also, something rare in China, precise. This was an extremely important quality for him, as he hated the traditional florid, irresponsible, and vague way of talking.

She noticed that he laughed a lot, and that he had shiny white teeth, unlike most other guerrillas, whose teeth were often brown and rotting. She was also attracted by his conversation. He struck her as learned and knowledgeable definitely not the sort of man who would mix up Flaubert and Maupassant.

When my mother told him she was there to report on the work of her students' union, he asked her what books the students were reading. My mother gave him a list and asked if he would come and give them some lectures on Marxist philosophy and history. He agreed, and asked her how many people there were at her school. She gave him an exact figure at once. Then he asked her what proportion of them backed the Communists; again she immediately gave him a careful estimate.

A few days later he turned up to start his course of lectures. He also took the students through Mao's works and explained what some of Mao's basic theories were. He was an excellent speaker, and the girls, including my mother, were bowled over.

One day, he told the students that the Party was organizing a trip to Harbin, the Communists' temporary capital in the north of Manchuria. Harbin was largely built by Russians and was known as 'the Paris of the East' because of its broad boulevards, ornate buildings, smart shops, and European-style cafes. The trip was presented as a sight seeing tour, but the real reason for it was that the Party was worried that the Kuomintang was going to try to retake Jinzhou, and they wanted to get the pro-Communist teachers and students, as well as the professional elite like doctors, out in case the city was reoccupied but they did not want to set off alarm bells by saying so. My mother and a number of her friends were among the 170 people chosen to go.

In late November my mother set off by train for the north in a state of high excitement. It was in snow-covered Harbin, with its romantic old buildings and its Russian mood of lingering pensiveness and poetry, that my parents fell in love. My father wrote some beautiful poems for my mother there. Not only were they in very elegant classical style, which was a considerable accomplishment, but she discovered that he was a good calligrapher, which raised him even higher in her esteem.

On New Year's Eve he invited my mother and a girlfriend of hers to his quarters. He was living in an old Russian hotel, which was like something out of a fairy tale, with a brightly colored roof, ornate gables, and delicate plaster work around the windows and on the veranda.

When my mother came in, she saw a bottle sitting on a rococo table; it had foreign lettering on it champagne.

My father had never actually drunk champagne before; he had only read about it in foreign books.

By this time it was well known among my mother's fellow students that the two were in love. My mother, being the student leader, often went to give long reports to my father, and it was noticed that she did not come back until the small hours. My father had several other admirers, including the friend who was with my mother that night, but she could see from how he looked at my mother, his teasing remarks and the way they seized every chance to be physically close to each other, that he was in love with her.

When the friend left toward midnight, she knew my mother was going to stay behind. My father found a note under the empty champagne bottle: "Alas! I shall have no more reason to drink champagne! I hope the champagne bottle is always full for you!"

That night, my father asked my mother whether she was committed to anyone else. She told him about her previous relationships, and said the only man she had really loved was her cousin Hu, but that he had been executed by the Kuomintang. Then, in line with the new Communist moral code which, in a radical departure from the past, enjoined that men and women should be equal, he told her about his previous relationships. He said he had been in love with a woman in Yibin, but that that had ended when he left for Yan'an. He had had a few girlfriends in Yan'an, and in his guerrilla days, but the war had made it impossible even to contemplate the idea of marriage. One of his former girlfriends was to marry Chen Boda, the head of my father's section of the Academy in Yan'an, who later rose to enormous power as Mao's secretary.

After hearing each other's frank accounts of their past lives, my father said he was going to write to the Jinzhou City Party Committee asking for permission to 'talk about love' (tan-lian-ai) with my mother, with a view to marriage.

This was the obligatory procedure. My mother supposed it was a bit like asking permission from the head of the family, and in fact that is exactly what it was: the Communist Party was the new patriarch. That night, after their talk, my mother received her first present from my father, a romantic Russian novel called It's Only Love.